In the summer of 2008, at the Water Cube, twenty-two-year-old twin sisters Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting will play the most beautiful chapter of their lives -- their quest to win China's first-ever Olympic synchronized swimming medal.
The girls are said to be using their "most beautiful legs in the world" to create a water cube on the surface of the water, a maneuver that only they can do because they have equally long legs. Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting, a pair of twin sisters from Sichuan, a pair of history-making Doha Asian Games champions, in addition to having the same appearance, but also have the same Olympic dream.
Swimming training began at the age of eight
The Sichuan sisters, who belong to the water, came into the world in September 1986. After eight carefree years, fate changed their lives.
Since then, they have taken a different path from their mates, shedding many tears and losing much of their playtime, and to exaggerate, they have probably spent far more time in the water than on land.
The story begins on a summer day in 1994, when Tian Chuan, a teacher at the Chengdu Sports Institute, was selecting swimmers for the Yandao Street Primary School, and Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting caught Mr. Tian's attention. The sisters still remember the first time they were thrown into the pool by the coach, they were thrown several meters away, fell into the water with a thud, and repeated this many times, choked on a lot of water, and cried from the beginning to the end of the whole process. This does not sound like a good memory, but it is the beginning of another part of the sisters' lives.
At the age of 8, they were past their prime, and they only practiced swimming as amateurs after school. Their parents didn't want them to be the best of the best, they just wanted them to be able to rely on exercise as a way to break the habit of skipping meals. But there was one person who never gave up - Coach Tagawa, who understood that these two sisters possessed a unique sense of water and beauty. He did not want to bury the talents of these two golden flowers. At that time, Tian Chuan remembered his old classmate, Zheng Jia, the coach of synchronized swimming team. He recommended his talent to Zheng Jia, and the other took a look and affirmed, "This is the good seedling he was looking for so hard."
"It's fate to know them, because I'm learning to swim, and one of my classmates is their coach, and knowing that I'm in synchronized swimming, he told me that he has a pair of twins there that are so beautiful that you'll love them, and I said, 'Bring them over to take a look.' " Zheng Jia recalled, "At that time I happened to be in the selection of talent, but also consciously looking for athletes with twins, and at that time there was another pair of twins practicing in my hands, and it turned out that when they came here, they did make the coaches' eyes light up." In this way, Wenwen and Tingting broke the rules and joined Zheng Jia's team, practicing synchronized swimming instead. They were 10 years old at that time, and no one thought that they would become the sisters of China's synchronized swimming to hit the Olympic medals 12 years later.
Entering the national swimming team
"As soon as you get into the water, you can feel that they are very comfortable in the water, and this is something that seems to be innate, that affinity for the water, which we professionally refer to as a better sense of water." Zheng Jia had this evaluation of their own love. Good sense of water, the swimming team under the foundation as well as under Zheng Jia, Wenwen, Tingting soon from the amateur team to the professional team. More than one coach has said that these twin sisters were born to practice synchronized swimming. There was a time when they trained with the national swimming team, and their good sense of water caught the attention of the swimming team's coach, who came to ask for them, and Zheng Jia said he didn't give them up.
With the passage of time, Zheng Jia on this pair of sisters is the more you see the more you like, "very young I told them, you two are born flower swimmers, form on the slender, body proportion is very good, the hands and legs are very long, flexibility is good, and the knees, the tops of the feet are very beautiful, the line is very smooth. Otherwise, the sense of rhythm, rhyme, and coordination are pretty good. The only thing lacking is the strength aspect, being an athlete also requires strength, which is something that needs to be trained later in life." With the coach's words, Wenwen, Tingting for flower swim full of longing, the two sisters at that time but with great excitement to join the professional team, however, in front of them, is a trekking long march.
It is knowing how good you have two diamonds in the rough that makes Zheng Jia's training even more demanding. How hard is it to become a professional synchronized swimmer? This is not words can explain, they have to pay for this blood and tears, beyond ordinary people imagine, never once thrown into the pool so simple.
While the understanding on the flower swim is very strong, in the batch of players at that time, Wenwen and Tingting are the smallest, in all aspects and the professional team is still behind a cut, they will have to pay more efforts. At that time, living in the team, children homesick, coupled with the cruel physical training, for which they have not cried a lot of noses, Wenwen until now still have vivid memories of the painful training, "that time every day to press the back of the foot, with a stool tied to the foot, a person sitting there." At that time every other week home, Jiang's mother can always see the two daughters hands because of the training of blood blisters, she is always careful to help their daughters to pick the blood blisters, and then put medicine, the next day and send the two daughters into the team to continue to train, "really heartbreaking, but the children are very understanding, and will not be in front of me to complain about the hard work of the training."
No matter how hard it is, no matter how many tears have been shed, as long as there is each other's support, Jiang Wenwen, Jiang Tingting all the way to the provincial team to the national youth team, and then to the national team, however, in 2004, a separation of the two sisters but almost let her younger sister Tingting produced negative training emotions.
The twins are still different in character, the older sister is more mature and understanding, the younger sister is more frank and stubborn, since childhood, Wenwen and Tingting's feelings are very good, not only is the sisterhood, there are also side by side with the revolutionary emotions, although life is not happy will also quarrel and quarrel, small fights, but they will soon be good, the two feelings are very deep. Wen said: "My sister character than I have to be a little stronger, but she has always listened to me, when we go shopping, in addition to sometimes play rock-paper-scissors to decide, usually in accordance with my opinion where to go or what to buy." And her sister often says that her sister is her backbone.
There was a quiz in the national team before the Athens Olympics, and her sister Wenwen ranked 10th and got into the national first team, while her sister Tingting stayed in the national second team with one difference. No matter what they do, the sisters are together, after training separately, the sister became self-loathing. Wenwen knew about her sister's situation and didn't say anything, but instead infected her sister with double the effort to pull herself together. It wasn't long before Tingting, who had stepped up her hard work and training, finally stood together with her sister again. Although the process has some twists and turns, but the two sisters still hand in hand over, from that day on this pair of sisters in order to no longer separate more hard into the training.
The incident reflected a difference in mentality between the two sisters, and a defeat in 2005 made the outspoken sister think of retiring. At that time, they were not the team's No. 1 combination, Beijing players Zhang Xiaohuan and Gu Beibei in the domestic flower swim pair project champion, every time Wenwen Tingting have to lose to their teammates. 2005 National Games, the sisters once again lost to Zhang Xiaohuan and Gu Beibei, frustrated Tingting in the phone call to his mother to talk about their own ideas of retiring, which is the sister of the Wen Wen heard Tingting had such thoughts, can be can't sit still, immediately said that if her sister does not practice, she does not want to practice alone, and finally her sister also dismissed the idea.
Asian Games win
Chances are always in favor of those who are prepared. The sisters, who were always not ranked as the No. 1 team and thus could not represent their country, were finally assigned by the national team to compete in the World Cup pairs competition in September 2006 because of an acute appendicitis in Gu Beibei. Unexpectedly, Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting were the ones who improved their teammate's previous result by one place, narrowly following the fourth-place U.S. team. It was this beautiful battle that blew Wenwen Tingting out of the water for the Asian Games.
96.584, the total competition score for China's first gold medal since synchronized swimming was listed as an official event at the 1994 Hiroshima Asian Games. And the move, called "Goddess of the Wind," beat the Japanese powerhouse duo of Emiko Suzuki/Harada Saaho, which ended 12 full years of Japanese dominance of the synchronized swimming pairs event at the Asian Games. In Doha in 2006, Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting became famous, not only mesmerized everyone, but also the judges.
Remembering that time, Wenwen and Tingting's voices are still trembling a bit, and Tingting said, "The most exciting part of the competition was the moment we walked up to the stage, because from that time on, the whole stage belonged to us." Standing on that stage was like going back to that feeling from years ago, Wen described it this way. After getting into the water, the girls performed "Goddess of the Wind" with neat and smooth rhythms, movements full of strength and beauty, and choreography that emphasized artistic expression. When the audience lit up the highest score, the audience erupted in thunderous applause, they almost did not dare to believe that they actually took the gold medal that several generations had dreamed of, they were reddened by their tears of joy, this moment from the age of 8 years old to eat all the suffering, have realized their value.
After taking the gold medal, the sisters called their parents far away from home, only to shout out a mother, choked to speech. Standing on the podium, they re-bloomed a bright smile, sister Tingting said, "the first time in the international competition to get first place, and when I heard the national anthem remembered, I felt as if I had won the Olympic Games." Their youthful years were dedicated to flower swimming, but when they stood on the podium, all the effort was worth it.
Many people can't tell which of them is which, and even though the older sister will say, "My face is rounder and my sister's is longer," and the younger sister will say, "My sister's personality is more cheerful than mine," there have been countless cases of mistaken identity since she was a child, and the younger sister, Wenwen, would sometimes sneak up on people and tell them that she was the one who was wrong. The first is a mole on her forehead, which is the safest and quickest way to tell the difference between her and her sister," she said.
Whether it's Tanigawa, the man who made them what they are, Zheng Jia, or now the devilish Masayo Imura, they all believe the sisters will do wonders in the water, and one of the biggest tenets can be attributed to the twins' unique strengths. No one can ignore the shock of having the same face doing the same moves, it's another beautiful synchronization, and as unfair as it may sound, there's really no need to shy away from such an advantage. At that time, when Yayoi Inamura came to China, he had specially found Zheng Jia, "Coach Inamura has always appreciated the beauty of the two of them, she told me, you can add more upper body movements to them, they are very beautiful, and both of them have similar faces, so that the judges can see more of their faces, and enhance the impression that they are twins, and that way the judges will like them more. "
Besides the beauty of the form, the other thing that gives twins an advantage is the somewhat esoteric-sounding telepathy. Many twins are telepathic with each other, and Wenwen and Tingting are no exception. Whether the two children are in the same room or not, when one is sick, the other will be in bad shape even if she's not, and when one is admonished by the coach, the other will be in an inexplicably low mood. Tingting says that there is a strong telepathic connection between her and her sister, "Both of us even have the exact same comprehension, and sometimes the mistakes are all wrong the same anyway." It's so beneficial for flower swimming that they hardly ever move out of sync during a race.
In fact, such precedents are not uncommon in synchronized swimming. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, twins Keren Josephson and Sarah Josephson from the United States won the silver medal in the pairs, and four years later in Barcelona, they swept to gold in the pairs, with the silver medal that year going to a pair of Canadian twins. It is said that it was watching that Olympics that gave Zheng Jia the idea of selecting and recruiting the twins, and it also became an opportunity for Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting to get involved with synchronized swimming.
Japanese synchronized swimming coach
The sisters became the center of attention after the Asian Games, because 2008 is just around the corner and they will be the hope of China's synchronized swimming to hit the Olympic medal. At the 2007 national synchronized swimming championships, a special spectator sat in the stands, and she was known as "Japan's godmother of synchronized swimming," Masayo Inamura, who won four bronze medals and two silver medals at the Olympics, and who became the head coach of the Chinese team after the Asian Games.
The seemingly friendly Inamura Yayoi is in fact a "devil's coach". Since the Japanese coach came to the Chinese team, the sisters' training volume from the previous 6 to 8 hours rose to more than 10 hours, as long as a movement is not good to keep practicing, until the practice can rest, this training often pushes Wenwen Tingting to the limit of the body, but also let the two girls from childhood physical fitness is quite poor often get sick, which is to let the Zhengjia in the sidelines of the heartbroken. "She also often told me that I am too spoiled them," Zheng Jia said with a smile, "in fact, because I know them better, these two children are not very good physique, every time they are sick, I am still quite heartbroken, a sick will have to delay the training. So, every time when they get to the point where they can't take it anymore, I say we should take half a day off, or we should let them sleep, and she says you're spoiling them too much, no, no sleep."
In addition to fine-tuning their movements, the Japanese godmother of synchronized swimming has also begun the devil's training for "fattening up" in order to strengthen the two sisters. Inoue Village stipulates that they must consume 5,000 calories a day. For children do not like to eat Wen Wen Tingting, this training is simply more than in the water can not eat, sometimes eat to vomit but also eat, that is how they gradually put the stomach to support the big, but also to keep their weight in about 55 kilograms.
In fact, because Masayo Inamura was so excited about the Chinese sisters, she was stunned by their beauty from the moment she first saw them, once saying, "Their legs are so skinny and long, like birds." She then customized a routine for them called "The Spirit of the Bird," and at the Good Luck Beijing Olympic Qualifying Synchronized Swimming Championships in April, the two sisters danced in the water to "Sea Haiyan," using their four equal legs to form a square that mirrored the exterior shape of the Water Cube. "They used their four equal length legs to form a square, echoing the exterior shape of the Water Cube. The sisters proudly said, "Because our legs are the same length, we are the only ones in the world who can do this move."
The thousand-mile horse seems to have met his match, but that's not the whole story. Since Inomura came to the Chinese team, the Jiang sisters' training load has risen to more than 10 hours, up from six to eight hours before, and the ever-tough older sister Jiang Wenwen has said, "It's so hard to practice, you don't have the energy to do anything else for the rest of the day." The younger sister Jiang Tingting even had the move to cry after training: "One day a movement to practice thousands of times, practice people just want to cry ah."
In addition to this, in order to strengthen the two sisters' strength, Inoue Village also asked them to "fatten up", so eating has also become a part of the training for the two sisters, and the two sisters even ate until they wanted to vomit.
But they also know that "to realize China's dream of winning an Olympic medal in synchronized swimming, we have to do what Coach Inoue says, no matter how hard it is."
Under Inumura's guidance, the Jiang sisters gained faster improvement, and at that year's Swimming World Championships, they achieved China's best result in synchronized swimming at the World Championships, placing fourth after Russia, Spain and Japan.
While they will still face a strong threat from Russia, Spain and Japan at the Olympics, the Jiang sisters' newfound progress gives them every reason to hope for an Olympic medal.
Masayo Imura, who worked hard to choreograph the Olympic moves for the pairs event, said, "They have very skinny and long legs, like birds." Inumura then began to design Olympic movements for this feature. And a set of beautiful and moving "the spirit of the bird" in a series of hard work finally came out, will become the two sisters to attack the Olympic medal "killer mace".
The Jiang sisters won the silver medal in the "Good Luck Beijing" synchronized swimming Olympic qualifying competition, and Inoue revealed that they will use the "Spirit of the Bird" in the Beijing Olympics, but the difficulty will be improved.
With the Beijing Olympics already getting closer and closer, Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting are getting closer and closer to their own dreams, and they understand the significance of this summer very well, "We are in the best state of our athletic career, and the Olympics must seize the opportunity to come up with good results."
"There is no trace of me in the sky, but I have flown."
Perhaps this poem by Rabindranath Tagore can be dedicated to Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting, the synchronized swimming sisters.
In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Jiang Wenwen and Jiang Tingting had a bad signing in the women's pairs synchronized swimming final, coming in seventh, while their rivals from Japan, Russia and Spain all came in after them, and in synchronized swimming competitions, the later the judges are, the more lenient the scoring is.
But Wenwen and Tingting were undisturbed and confident. They were still in their sequined green swimsuits, and still in their "Spirit of the Bird" preliminaries, but Wenwen and Tingting were almost perfect today.
The first turn they did after entering the water was quite beautiful, and the climax came in the slow music section, where Wenwen and Tingting first used their legs to form a "cross" shape that was level with the water, and then switched to a back-to-back position to complete a "blind spot" where they couldn't see each other, and the "blind spot" where they could not see each other. "Blind spot" with the last and long legs stacked on top of each other, formed a world only they can complete the square, and slowly floated out of the water, won the field of a gasp. This unique action is the Japanese coach Yayoi Imura according to the characteristics of the sisters' long legs specially designed. After completing the whole set, the sisters got a final score of 48.250 and temporarily ranked first with a total score of 96.334.
Then, the powerful Spanish team scored 99 points with a hot but precise routine, surpassing the Chinese team in the first place.
The Jiang sisters' biggest rivals on their way to a medal, the Japanese pair of Naho Harada/Emiko Suzuki, took the stage, having narrowly led in the previous preliminary round by just 0.166 points.
The Japanese pair entered the water with their usual strength and precision, a high water lift and a long series of difficult leg movements that showed their strength advantage. They also improved on the synchronization problems they had in the previous day's competition. Although Harada's fitness was reduced in the final stage, it didn't affect the quality of their performance, and they scored 48.917 in the final, winning the bronze medal with a total of 97.167 points against the Chinese team.
Defending champions Anastasia Davydova/Anastasia Yermakova, the penultimate Russian duo, came out in the final and put on another perfect performance that is almost hard to describe, scoring full marks for their technical performance and defending their title with an unquestionable total score of 99.833.
"As long as we worked hard, we have a clear conscience." After the race, the sisters said that their efforts and progress were obvious to all, and that the fourth-place finish was already the best in history, which would inspire the girls of the Chinese synchronized swimming team to strive for better results in subsequent team competitions.